Tuesday, January 24, 2012

When the lorry won't fit

Joe went off to work early this morning leaving me with the prospect of a delivery of new chairs for the sitting room. Delightful, I know, especially as they were bought in a sale and so were a good price. We got the present chairs second hand, along with a settee that sagged into decrepitude some years ago. However deliveries to our house are not as simple as a lorry turning up and men putting your new furniture into its room.

First problem was whether the chairs would fit through the less-than-standard-width door. When we moved here we brought stuff in via the wider door to the courtyard, but there's a glasshouse tacked on there now. So, after several somewhat optimistic measurings Joe took the sitting-room door off its hinges as a precaution. I had my fingers crossed but was in a state of some anxiety.

When the courier phoned for directions I asked what size lorry he was in.

'Big,' he said. 'Very big.' Oh dear. Anxiety turned acute. I couldn't eat breakfast at all. Walking the dogs (dog actually. Small one wouldn't come. It was raining) I tried to reassure myself about the turn in the road and the flat bridge.

Didn't work.

I phoned my friend Dominic, who lives up the road and has a white van, on the off-chance he might be in and available.

'Dominic I'm in a fix. Any chance you could give me a hand. We could do a barter with the work on the website I'm doing for you.'

He agreed, oh joy.

I rang the couriers, now on their way from Galway and already up the road in Kilanena.

'Is your lorry really big? I mean, really really big?'

'It's very big.'

'I'll meet you by the two-storey stone house,' I said.

Just as well. I'd say the lads wouldn't have even tried. They'd have stalled at the first hurdle of the tiny turn off the main road. Not worth their while to risk it. And what if they'd got stuck? And then there's the difficulty of turning when they got here.

So the chairs arrived. They were in boxes with the backs having to be slotted on after. No need for the door-off-the hinges business after all.

I've put one of them together already and had a coffee sitting in it with my feet up. For they're recliners! A chance thing, not what we went looking for, but what comfort. What luxury.

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About Me

Two blogs now.
Floating Boater is mostly about our life on the waterways of Ireland on Winter Solstice, our timber cruiser. She's a Rampart 32 built in 1969 in Southampton. She was one of the last this size to come out of the Rampart boatyard – plastic was the material of the future. So a classic but with a definite sixties bent.
Every summer we take off on the astonishingly varied waterways of Ireland and enter another, sweeter world. In between I tend my vegetables, look after our acre or so of garden in East Clare, write poetry, and teach and play flute. I occasionally have to do other paid work too.
We're on the move from our present house and I have a new acre to begin. So Mucky Fingernails is the gardening wing. It's a record of the creation of a new garden, starting from an open field.